


Bringing a Partner Home

by Daegaer



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Assassins & Hitmen, Gen, Kidnapping, Psychic Abilities, Teenagers, Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 08:47:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/pseuds/Daegaer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kidnapped and far from home, Mamoru meets a potential ally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bringing a Partner Home

**Author's Note:**

> References to the manga timeline. Written for the WK Reverse Fest.

_Nine_

 

Mamoru tried to hunch down, to make himself as small as possible, but the tall man's grip on his arm kept him upright, more or less. The low-ceilinged room was bright and bare, the unshielded fluorescent light humming just above his captor's head. Mamoru closed his eyes and pretended that when the door opened Daddy and Mummy would be there, no matter what the kidnappers had said. _Home_ , he thought, _I want to go home. I want to go home. I want -_

"Shh," the man said, though Mamoru hadn't said anything out loud. "Quiet, now. He's coming."

"Who?" Mamoru said in a squeak. Maybe the new man would be like the kidnappers, he thought, his fear rising. Maybe he'd hit him if Mamoru couldn't keep quiet, like they had. Masafumi said men who stole little boys did terrible, scary things to them and even if Mamoru had only half understood the details Masafumi had taken such ghoulish delight in whispering, he knew he didn't want any of that stuff being done to him.

The door opened and a perfectly normal looking man came in. Mamoru felt almost disappointed until he felt a strange creeping sensation as if someone were looking over his shoulder. He turned around quickly, but there was no one else there. The new man just looked at him, and Mamoru suddenly thought he could hear someone whispering to him, telling him he had to be quiet and to do everything he was told, that his Daddy wanted him to go away with these men, that he had paid the kidnappers to _take_ him away. The sensation of wrongness and fear inside him built up and up and he realized he might never see his Mummy and brothers again.

"No!" Mamoru yelled, throwing the word as if it was a weapon at the new man. He felt strangely emptied, as if he had cried for a long time until he could cry no more. The man nodded, a satisfied look on his face.

"You felt it?" the first man said.

"Indeed," the second said. "Unformed, undisciplined, but there's something there that can be used. He instinctively attacks – that's a good sign."

"Lucky boy," the first man said, looking down at Mamoru. "It seems you're not disposable. We'll leave this evening."

Mamoru curled inward on himself, and told himself he wasn't going to cry.

 

* * *

 

_Thirteen_

 

“Takatori!”

“Yes!”

Mamoru fixed his eyes on a point just over Shimoff’s right shoulder and kept a polite look on his face. He allowed himself to feel a natural apprehension for being singled out by an older student, with a thread under it of thought about the weapons class he had just been called from. He let his disguised thoughts about his proficiency in target shooting rise and fall, as if they really held any of his attention and he were trying to damp it down respectfully. Under it all he thought about lunch and idly wondered if the rumours about Shimoff whoring himself to the instructors for extra recreation privileges were true. It was safe enough; the older boy was no telepath.

“They want you off in Touchy-Feely Central,” Shimoff said, with the disdain pyrokinetics had for everyone who didn’t risk accidentally cauterizing their brains when they picked their noses. “Come on.”

Mamoru trotted along behind him, more worried now than when Shimoff had come up. Much of the training for empaths involved inducing the desired emotion in the student and then forcing them to learn to project it onto others. A student in the midst of any training session was disoriented and vulnerable - who knew what was in store for him now? Mamoru steadied his breathing and began running through some mental calming exercises in the vain hope he would be able to keep himself under control.

He took a final deep breath as Shimoff opened the door of one of the training rooms and came to attention.

“Takatori, Ma’am.”

“Good,” the woman in the room said. “Come in, Takatori. Dismissed, Shimoff.”

Mamoru stepped in and kept his mind as quiet and empty as he could. Radke was a telempath, and would pick up inattention and disrespect almost faster than he would know he was experiencing it. He carefully thought nothing at all about the unknown boy standing against the far wall.

“Takatori,” Radke mused, flicking through the papers of a file. “Thirteen years old, Tokyo native – “ She looked up suddenly and said something in fast Japanese, a long and involved sentence Mamoru belatedly realized was a question.

For a moment, he just blinked at her, then he tried to respond, finding himself slow and halting in his answer. He had never in his previous life needed to have an opinion on the international oil trade, and found even simple words slipping from his grasp. He hadn’t even known Radke spoke Japanese.

“Enough,” she said, holding up a hand. “You’ve let your native language get rusty, Takatori. This is not acceptable.”

Mamoru stood silently, accepting the rebuke. It was pointless to protest that it had long since been made clear to him that German was the language of instruction in Rosenkreuz, or to point out that there was no one to teach Japanese. She indicated the boy at the far end of the room.

“Introduce yourselves. Takatori in Japanese, Naoe in German.”

The boy looked up from the floor, his face entirely expressionless. Mamoru saw that he had large dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept properly for some time.

“My name is Nagi Naoe,” he said in slow, careful German, and Mamoru felt homesick at the sound of his accent. “I am eleven years old. I am from Tokyo. Since some months I have been in Rosenkreuz.”

Mamoru nodded. “I’m Takatori Mamoru,” he said, glad that simple words were all he needed to remember. “I’m thirteen – I’m from Tokyo too. I’ve been in Rosenkreuz for four years.”

“Naoe’s period of assessment is over,” Radke said. “Takatori, you will ensure he quickly becomes fluent in German, and you may speak Japanese to each other in order to keep at native fluency. Naoe, you will be expected to match other trainees of your age in German within six months. You will both bring your vocabulary and reading ability in Japanese to an adult level within twelve months. Educational and informational material will be provided.” Without another word she walked out, leaving them alone.

Both boys breathed out. Mamoru looked more closely at his new charge. “So, what ability brought you here?” he asked in German.

“They said it’s called _telekinesis_ ,” Naoe said in Japanese. “Why do you sound weird when you talk?”

“I don’t,” Mamoru said in the same language. “It’s just I’ve been speaking –“ he paused, surprised he had no idea how to say _German_. “I haven’t spoken Japanese for four years,” he said. “I forgot some stuff and I was only a kid when I got here. “

“Why are you here?” Naoe said.

_My dad didn’t pay the ransom and I wish he was dead_ , wasn’t something Mamoru was ever prepared to say or think too loudly, and it was long past and not worth bothering with. Anyway, it was easy enough to smile with the pleasure of being the older student who had to be listened to. “I’m an empath,” he said. “I can sense what people feel, a bit of what they’re thinking, and I can influence them to do what I want.”

“What do you want?” Naoe said.

“Oh, when we’re older we’ll be given jobs to do, and we’ll help make society run the way it should, with people like us at the top,” Mamoru said airily. “I suppose I’ll make people give me stuff I want at the time. What do you want?”

“I want to kill everyone who’s ever pissed me off,” Naoe said, like he was commenting that the sky was blue.

Mamoru half-laughed in surprise. The boy wasn’t as disoriented as he might have been expected to be after the exhausting and frightening period of initial assessment. A TK ally he could talk to in a language few others spoke would be a great asset. He smiled an open and friendly smile, backing it up with a wave of good cheer.

“You’ll fit right in! Do you mind if I call you _Nagi-kun_?”

Naoe shrugged his bored assent.

“OK, then, Nagi-kun, let me show you round the student areas. We should speak in, um – not Japanese - “

“German,” Nagi supplied, sounding half-way amused at Mamoru’s slip-up.

“- _German_ out with the others, but we can talk Japanese otherwise,” Mamoru said, his smile more genuine. People who felt superior were so much easier to lead astray, and really, he’d figured that he had nothing to lose with such a small, private mistake. “And we can see what sort of Japanese stuff to read and watch that they give us, OK?”

“Do you think it’d be the new season animes?” Nagi said, sounding a lot younger.

“Sorry,” Mamoru said. “I wouldn’t think you should hold your breath. Let’s go get some lunch.”

Keeping the friendly smile on his face, he led Nagi out of the room.

 

* * *

 

_Fifteen_

 

“Get up.”

Mamoru held up his hand and let Nagi tug him to his feet. His head was still ringing and his eye stung with blood running into it and down his face. Still, the other guys looked a lot worse and that was what counted.

“It would be really _useful_ if you could fry the bastards’ brains,” Nagi grumbled. “It’d save me a lot of effort.”

“I managed to talk them down a bit and keep them from doing much until you got here,” Mamoru said, surprised by how thick and shaking his voice was. That wasn’t good. He couldn’t afford to look weak, even if Nagi was the only other conscious person around; he hadn’t gone to years’ worth of effort with the boy just to let him think he was better than Mamoru now. “I’m fine,” he said, and gingerly touched his aching jaw to see if any teeth had been knocked out.

Nagi pulled a wadded up lump of toilet paper out of his pocket and wiped at the blood, frowning slightly.

“It’s worse than it looks,” he said. “I think you’re OK.”

“Told you,” Mamoru said. “I hope you didn’t blow your nose too much on that before wiping it on my face.”

“So you get my germs, so what?” Nagi’s shoulders slumped and he looked more like an ordinary kid and less like the furious creature that had just flung Mamoru’s attackers into the walls. “I’m sick of this shit,” he said. “I’m sick of all of it.”

Hugging was something Nagi pretty much never wanted, and Mamoru was glad his ability had let him see that clearly before he had ever tried anything on back when they first knew each other and found himself with a broken neck for his pains. Right now, though, he was radiating misery and desperation so Mamoru risked putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing gently. Nagi flinched a little, but that was probably him being jittery after expending his ability in the first rush of anger. Rosenkreuz trained TKs to jump straight to _fight_ rather than _flight_ , and a lot of them poured too much effort into their attacks until they could learn to control themselves.

“We’ll get out of here, and then things will be different,” he said. “You said kids beat you up before you were here – this is the same. Kids are assholes, it’ll be better when we’re adults.”

“Yeah,” Nagi said. “When we’re adults and we’re in control of ourselves and we give a shit about the precious _cause_ -“

“Shh!” Mamoru hissed.

“I want out now, Mamoru! I’m sick of watching my back, I’m sick of the way the pretty kids come back sniveling when they’ve been caught alone –“

“Good job you’re a scrawny, butt-ugly stick, isn’t it?” Mamoru said, as cheerfully as he could. Nagi rolled his eyes, but seemed a little less agitated. “You’re not vulnerable, anyone would be mad to try that on with you.” He reinforced the praise with a wave of admiration and Nagi calmed all the way down.

“D’you want to wait till you’re an adult to get out?” Nagi said, and to Mamoru’s surprise moved in close and wound his arms around him, his lips snug against Mamoru’s ear. “Or would you like to go _now?_ ” he whispered in little more than a breath.

Mamoru supposed if anyone was watching it would look like a post-fight make-out session. If they were lucky. If they didn't know how stand-offish about that sort of thing Nagi was. He dropped his face down onto the place where Nagi’s neck and shoulder joined.

“Mm-hmm,” he said against his skin and sighed as Nagi snuggled in closer and gave an over-the-top coquettish giggle. It wasn’t a very convincing performance, but then he supposed no one in Rosenkreuz had any experience with normal teenagers. Maybe it would be convincing.

"The man who brought me here," Nagi whispered, "he said he knew he'd need me and he'd be back within three years. That's almost up. We'll get him to take you too, and then we can go rule the world like you want." He pulled back enough to look mockingly into Mamoru's eyes. "Or I can help you kill that bastard father of yours."

Mamoru's chest constricted with emotion and he smiled happily. He _knew_ he'd been right to cultivate Nagi as an ally. He turned the hug into a tight real one for a moment and let go before Nagi could get irritated.

"I told you you'd fit in, Nagi-kun," he grinned. "Let's go before training starts up again, I could use some lunch."

Still smiling, he led Nagi away from the scene of the fight. He would really _enjoy_ introducing him to his family.


End file.
